Adverbs

[Price Nicholas]

Most class periods in Mr. Dube’s English class focus more on reading and doing individual writing assignments than on actual lectures. One lesson that Mr. Dube did do recently, though, was a lesson on adverbs.

Objectives: Students will know what an adverb is, how to identify an adverb in a sentence, and how to write sentences with adverbs

Warm up: Mr. Dube didn’t really use any specific warm up or hook to start the lesson. He starts his class the same way every day; with a list of the things they will do on the projector. So the introduction for this lesson was him telling the students that the first part of class will be spent learning about adverbs.

Motivational Strategies: The only motivational strategy that Mr. Dube used for this lesson was the fact that there would be a quiz on this topic later in the week. At the beginning of the lesson, he reminded the students that they should pay attention since he was basically giving them the answers to the quiz. And, when he had them write their own sentences, he reminded them that this would be great practice for the quiz on friday.

Activities: Mr. Dube lectured on adverbs for around 10 minutes. He then did some example sentences on the board for about 3 minutes. After that, students identified the adverbs on projected sentences and he called on people to respond. This lasted about 5 minutes. Finally, students wrote their own sentences, and some people shared with the class. Probably another 5-10 minutes.

Follow-up: Mr. Dube was very intentional about letting students know that this lesson was building towards a quiz later in the week.

I think that the lesson was successful overall, but it definitely wasn’t nuanced or intentional about making sure it worked for all students. I don’t know if that is a bad thing in this context, as the class is really big and Mr. Dube probably just wanted to make sure as many people knew it as possible so he could help the people struggling separately. Additionally, it doesn’t seem like Mr. Dube places much value in the lecturing format for teaching, so I think the adverbs was just something he felt like had to be done but he wanted to get it over with and return to having students do real work, like reading and writing.

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